One could think that the whole world is twittering judging
by this Time Magazine cover.
The social marketing tool is getting a lot of attention and, like anything that’s on trend, marketers are hoping to capitalize on it.
In his cover story about Twitter in Time, Steven Johnson writes that “successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.”
But he also adds later that it’s entirely possible that three or four years from now, we’ll have moved on.
A recent Ipsos Reid study offers a reality check.
It shows that only 26% of online Canadians are aware of Twitter. Of those, 6% reported using it. This equates to roughly 1% of the population as a whole.
In Quebec, awareness of Twitter is significantly lower at only 7%. Applying the same ratio of awareness to usage, this would equate to .3% of the Quebec population – about 21,000 people.
So, are these 20 thousand Twitter users engaged with businesses and brands or just telling their followers what they had for breakfast?
It’s hard to tell.
In his Time article, Johnson writes that last month an anticommunist uprising in Moldova was organized via Twitter and that the Chinese government blocked access to Twitter in an attempt to censor discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Could just 140 characters start a political uprising? Or revive interest in Quebec’s sovereignty?
Twitterholic.com, with its twittastic robots that scan the Twitter public timeline for new twits to tweet, reports that the most popular Twitter user in Quebec is Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, with 1,146 followers. He’ll likely need a few more twits to create a country.
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